U.S. Strategic Command officials confirmed Wednesday that a small meteor that crashed of the Northeast Coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014 actually traveled from another solar system before splashing down into the Pacific.
With the official name, CNEOS 2014-01-08, the meteor crashed on Jan. 8, 2014 with an energy equivalent to about 110 metric tons of TNT into the depths of the ocean.
CNEOS 2014-01-08 was identified as an interstellar meteor in a 2019 study co-written by an undergraduate student at Harvard University, a professor of science at Harvard.
The U.S. Space Command released a document regarding the discovery, where U.S. Space Force Lt. Gen. John Shaw stated that officials reviewed additional data and confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA.
The trajectory of this particular meteor was peculiar, along with the extremely high velocity and unusual direction at which it encountered our planet. So when you put it all together, then the conclusion is that it came from interstellar space.
The fireball was detected by sensors on a classified U.S. government satellite designed to detect foreign missile launches.
The Department of Defense has partnered with NASA and had jointly posted details of the event which were eventuall shared on a public database hosted by the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) within the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
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